The present disclosure relates to methods and/or apparatuses for capturing and reporting road traffic conditions.
Road traffic conditions are reported by television and radio broadcasts to provide vehicle driver's awareness of current traffic conditions on the route on which the driver is operating a vehicle. The actual traffic condition information for such television and radio broadcast are acquired from cameras either stationally mounted at key intersections, buildings or bridges throughout a locale or from helicopters which traverse a given route over a locale. Reporters can also provide traffic condition audio and/or visual reports from their current location.
While such traffic condition reports are current as the nature of television and radio broadcast limits the broadcast of such traffic conditions to only selected times during a given hour of a 24 hour day, such as every 15, 30 or 60 minutes. It is common for more frequent traffic condition reports to be broadcast during morning and evening rush hours and fewer in the middle of the day and practically none during the night time.
Current vehicle navigation systems provide an image of a road on which a vehicle is traveling along with intersections, cross-roads, alternate routes, and major traffic influencing events, such as road construction.
Mobile applications such as Google Maps®, can provide a still photograph of a particular road segment, intersection, etc. However, such photographic information is completely independent of current road conditions as the visual images are old images stored in memory and very infrequently updated.
It would be desirable to obtain current traffic condition reports which can be downloaded and viewed or otherwise made available to a vehicle driver in advance of a particular road segment ahead of the current position of the vehicle.